Design of Temperature controlled Seasonal Weather Emulating Chamber for Rapid Testing of Concrete Samples: Peltier Model Phase.

The project described in this paper is based on sequential and progressive approach to development of a temperature controlled weather condition emulator for testing of concrete samples during a short period of time. It can be used to test concrete samples when the engineer wants to investigate the concrete behaviour under extreme conditions such as cold, very high temperature or drastic drops of temperature incurred in a short period. As an initial phase of the development process, the entire system architecture is sub-phased to a modular form and hence formulates each module for simulation before realizing of the final fabrication of the actual system. The main objective here is to model the proposed concrete test equipment with an attached thermoelectric Peltier as the main heat source. Mathematical modelling of dynamics of the Peltier systems are not well defined and they are assumed to be highly nonlinear in behaviour. Therefore, controlling of the system is selected by a fuzzy inference engine. Modelling of the system dynamics is carried out by approximating the real behaviour of Peltier dynamics. Simulations of a subjective testing chamber with Peltier dynamics are carried out through a model based on the Matlab/Simulink integrated project, in which the characteristics of the proposed emulator are discussed and analysed with given appropriate constrains. Finally, the obtained simulation results are tested as per initial phase according to the expectations of the concrete test emulator requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]